Vehicle collisions are costly. For example, the Illinois Department of Transportation issued a report in 2015 indicating that there were 296,049 crashes involving motor vehicles in Illinois in 2014. That same report indicates that the total estimated cost of crashes in Illinois for 2014 was $5.8 billion. A substantial portion of those costs are associated with repairing the crashed vehicles (i.e., vehicles involved in a crash). In some instances, a crashed vehicle will display a malfunction indicator lamp (MIL) to indicate that a diagnostic trouble code (DTC) is currently set to an active status. The DTC can be indicative of a particular vehicle malfunction. Repairing a crashed vehicle can include repairing the vehicle malfunction so that the MIL is not illuminated when the vehicle owner drives the repaired vehicle away from the repair shop.
In many instances, an insurance company, such as the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, issues an insurance policy that covers at least some of the costs associated with repairing a policy holder's crashed vehicle. Many insurance policies do not cover the costs associated with repairing a vehicle malfunction that existed before a vehicle crash or a vehicle malfunction that arose while repairing the crashed vehicle.
Many insurance companies require or determine estimates for repairing a crashed vehicle. A problem in determining an estimate to repair a crashed vehicle is determining whether or not a DTC set to the active status within the crashed vehicle existed before the vehicle crash. Existing vehicle scan tools do not determine whether a DTC set in a vehicle is collision-related.
Furthermore, in many situations, a vehicle body repair person is skilled in repairing the body of a damaged vehicle, but is unskilled as to using a vehicle scan tool to diagnose or repair a vehicle because of the complexity of the scan tool. A diagnostic tool configured to determine if a DTC is collision-related and/or that is simpler to use would be useful to many vehicle body repair persons.